Forum - View topicThe Mike Toole Show - Unicorn Power
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penguintruth
 Posts: 8461 Location: Penguinopolis |
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It's complicated. He's kind of a clone with Char's memories implanted in him via collected Newtype willpower... and so forth. |
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Fronzel
Posts: 1906 |
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I couldn't stomach my way through the awful dialogue, nonsensical character behavior, or overly respectful homages (i.e. copying) of older Gundam stuff in Unicorn.
Given the tonguebath it gave certain recurring (i.e. lazy) story elements from other UC shows I was really annoyed how badly it failed those few hard sci-fi elements that lurk in the background in Gundam. It gave a space colony an "artificial sun" when not using actual sunlight would be horribly wasteful and Full Frontal said that from the colonies the sun was just another star which is wrong since the colonies are at real locations that are at most only marginally further from the sun than the Earth is. |
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Tylerr
Posts: 475 |
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Eh i never got the hype for unicorn.
It was just an average series for me, and it certainly didn't help that it took them 4 years to release 7 episodes. Also never a fan of using cgi on mechs. in space fights it was okay because there was really no background, but on anything else they really stand out and look fake compared to everything else. Gundam should stick to what its best at, hand drawn gundams, and a 50ish episode tv series. |
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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I thought 0080: War in the Pocket was pretty good. |
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Fronzel
Posts: 1906 |
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Gundam isn't so great at 50ish episode tv series and 0080 is by far the best work with the name attached. |
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Kaioshin_Sama
Posts: 1215 |
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Gundam I still think gets a tremendous amount of complaining from its fanbase to the point of ridiculousness. I see other franchises get complaining too and sometimes I think oh maybe its just angry fanboys in general only for the next work to come out and it becoming apparent that no it really is a special case. Gundam it often feels like the idea of enjoyment and appreciation isnt even on the table and you can just tell that so many works are just dead right out of the gate. Its not about watching and seeing how things develop so much as what can one latch onto to complain about profusely and seemingly proudly and it can get pretty off putting and give the show a bad vibe immediately. Like as in people looking to see if a show is worth picking up only to run into a thread full of dtm42's implying that every Gundam work is utterly iredeemable to its core are going to probably avoid the franchise if they don't know any better. Its tough seeing it as a franchise fan and makes me count every time I manage to get someone interested in at least giving a Gundam series a try a small victory. I think Unicorn and the Origin have helped a little in recent times in generating some renewed interest in Gundam because they allow the more reasonable folk out there to see that there's a lot of bullshit complaining coming from what I've taken to calling the Hundred Percenters. As in 100% of all posting must be dedicated to finding fault, complaining and nitpicking a show to the core and zero positive discussion or reflection, just not even considered for a second. As a good example earlier dtm42 going 100% by calling the battles in Unicorn crap on top of all the rest of the complaining. Theres always some attempt to justify this approach and deflect it back on Sunrise or whatever by implying that if they do it right then...well to be honest I rarely see people say what will happen but likely it just involves going 100% on the work anyway. Mainly I just wish such folk would either just wish admit that the idea they might ever say something positive about Gundam rather than shitposting it to death isn't on the table or give it a rest for a bit or something that doesn't involve endless griping and what is starting to look personal in the case of some, but I feel like that'd be expecting to much. I also know envy is a sin but I'm honestly fairly jealous of other fanbases who dont have to deal with this sort of thing to such a dedicated degree. Like I'd never stop having Gundam as my favorite franchise but I'd gladly swap fanbases with just about any other one, besides maybe Naruto because I figure no matter what I'd be trading up significantly in terms of general positivity and open mindedness which is all I could really ask. |
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Merxamers
 Posts: 720 |
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i'd like to get into Gundam, but every 'watch list' i find online has more entries in it than there are books of the Bible. Even when i do know what i want to watch (the Mobile Gundam compilation films are where i'm supposed to start, apparently), they're only available in sketchy sites or as $100 out-of-print dvds.
First world problems. |
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jr240483
 Posts: 4378 Location: New York City,New York,USA |
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I'm afraid your inaccurate about that. the series is unfortunately getting the sub only treatment. at least that is what right stuff is doing when they announced the license. the only way i can see they would include a dub is that it sells really well. it seems that now that bandai ent is six feet under, the chances of any gundam series unless its something big like Unicorn or The Origin will unfortunately also suffer the same sub only fate. where my opine is a mood point considering that AGE let alone Build Fighters & Biuld Fighters Try haven't been licensed in the US and given a proper english dub instead of that crappy ass South Asia dub which sounds as bad as those dubs from Animax Asia. Sure while the southasia english dub version of AGE is not as bad as the horror that 4kids (nothing will ever top those people) but definitely a complete mess. |
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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Wow, you sure do like to come out and blatantly lie. I like 0080 for instance, which you'd know if you had bothered to read my previous post which is two above your own. And I found Gundam X and Gundam SEED to both be pretty good as well.
Funny that you value open mindedness when you and other UC fanboys have shown so little of it in your dogged defence of some truly terrible titles.
There are plenty of torrent sites out there that you could download the trilogy from. First world solutions. |
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Tylerr
Posts: 475 |
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i think that one was average at best. If i had to pick a shorter one it would be 0083: Stardust Memory i had a lot of time on my hands years ago and marathoned the entire gundam series. Started with the original gundan and went all the way to seed. Almost stopped with the first gundam because of how annoying those damn little kids were. Rethinking my original statement... really the original gundam storyline doesn't tend to have a good history with long tv series. i find most of the alternate universe gundams to be better done than them (Wing, seed, 00). G Gundam was atrocious though and Age was poorly done past the first arc {Edit: Please don't over-quote. Thanks. ~ Psycho 101} |
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Fronzel
Posts: 1906 |
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0080 actually does something with the war theme other than melodramatic screaming and crying. It gets to the "war is not a game" part and keeps going. The last quarter or third of 0083 is a great tense action-thriller bit and Gato was a great villain, but those three episodes with the one-armed man were really awful and the main character is an idiot...although that's true of most Gundam shows and I sometimes think he was supposed to come off as a loser since he actually ultimately fails at pretty much everything. As a prequel to Zeta Gundam it makes the whole fascist conspiracy in that show more believable, but since Zeta spirals off into madness and drops the political angle the effort is kind of wasted. {Edit: Please don't over-quote. Thanks. ~ Psycho 101} |
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penguintruth
Posts: 8461 Location: Penguinopolis |
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I felt that 0083 was little more than a love letter to Zeon, because their ideals were essentially framed as right, or at least more righteous than the cartoonishly (lol), unnecessarily over the top corrupt Federation.
Also, the "hero" of 0083 might be the biggest loser in Gundam history. I know that he has to lose to a certain degree, since it leads to the creation of the Titans (though it's sort of unnecessary for this story to be told to justify that in the Zeta narrative), but he must've failed at every single goal he set out to accomplish. Kou Uraki might actually be considered a Zeon hero. |
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Redbeard 101
Oscar the Grouch
Forums Superstar  Posts: 16935 |
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Alright DTM and Kaioshin_Sama it's time for you both to settle down please. Instead of arguing with him DTM, and then poking a jab at all "UC fanboys", you should have simply reported his post for being rude and baiting you. As for you Kaioshin_Sama your post was rude and blatant bait for him to reply to. While you may not agree with DTM's opinions (you didn't even get them all correct either) he is entitled to them so there is no need for veiled attacks.
You've both been warned in the past week in regards to your conduct. So getting into more arguments, regardless of with who or in what thread, or baiting users won't help either of your cases. You're both facing being put on moderation at this point. I doubt either of you want that. So avoiding further incidents would be appreciated. Thank you. Last edited by Redbeard 101 on Tue Apr 07, 2015 9:18 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Fourteenthangel
 Posts: 66 |
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The thing about us Gundam fans is that we can never seem to agree on anything. Which in turn makes in harder for people outside the fandom to get into the franchise. There is no one series that is generally agree upon to be good. I thought Unicorn had almost universal praise at least until I went on the forum were the opinions seems rather mixed.
Someone on this thread mentioned that the CG in Unicorn was bad? Coming from a guy who hates CG in mecha anime I thought the CG in Unicorn blended almost seamlessly and they only really used it for scenes that would otherwise be incredibly difficult to do otherwise such as the transformation sequences or the monstrosity that is Neo Zeong. Then again I digress. Your going to be seeing more CG in mecha anime so you might as well get used to it. Even today, hand drawn mecha in anime are a rarity. |
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Krotchstak
Posts: 94 |
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Wow, this has to be the most passionate Gundam-related thread on this site in recent memory. I'm a Pretty Big Fan of the franchise as a whole, so I guess I'll throw in my own two cents on Unicorn. This is going to be a novel, guys.
First, my Official Episode Ranking, top to bottom: 1 --> 2/3 --> 6/4 --> 5 -------------->7 I'll start off by saying that I get why people don't like Unicorn. At the end of the day, you're either on board with what it's doing, or you're not, and if you're not, then it's going to leave a much worse impression than if you get invested. But me, I really like Unicorn. It's not my absolute favorite (that would be 0080) but it's pretty high up there, even though if I had to give it some kind of numerical ranking, it'd be around a 7 or so. It has a lot of warts (although they only start becoming noticeable around episode 4 and only seriously started hurting the show in the final episode), but I think it's generally remarkably solid. When the show succeeds, it goddamn SOARS. And I think it succeeds quite a lot. Stuff I like: -I like Banagher, or at least I think he has one of the clearest character arcs in the franchise. I'm not going to say he's my favorite Gundam protagonist, but he's certainly one of the best-written: every single action he takes has a clear influence in something that he experienced prior, and you can watch him grow as a character on-screen in real time. And he fails! He fails a lot! right up through the 4th episode, he's struggling to use the power he's been given in a way that lets him stick to his worldview, and he regularly fails at doing so. One of the biggest disservices that the final episode does to him is make his "decision" of what to do with the Box feel like a narrative matter-of-course and not something that was the sum of what he did and saw throughout the show. It was doing so well until then. Props to him. -I like most of the supporting cast. Marida and Zinnerman are obvious standouts, but even when the show's runtime can't support all its players, they fit in nicely (with a few exceptions). This includes the villains - until the finale, I was prepared to call Full Frontal one of my favorite Gundam antagonists. I can't do that now, since his motivations are a complete cipher, but the reveal of his plot and his general role as a villain is so well executed up to that point that he continues to rank pretty high. -I like the Box itself, though exactly why it's so perfectly thematically apt is never properly addressed. But thinking about it, I'm glad it wasn't some world-ending superweapon or an "INDEPENDENCE FOR THE SPACENOIDS!" clause or something. It was a wonderful prayer indeed. The Box itself is one of the few things that that beautiful mess of an episode got right. -Thematically, the show is great. And beyond that, it had ambition. It was TRYING to do something. This is why I can't get behind those accusations of it being lazy. Gundam SEED is lazy. Gundam 00, past the first dozen episodes, is lazy. And lest you call me a UC purist, Victory is also lazy. But Unicorn? No way. Even the bits of it accused of being lazily ripped from other UC shows have a lot of clear thought put into them. They BELONG in the show. Their existence is justified. A lot of legwork is done for the plot. -How Newtypes are used. It not only dealt with the long-neglected Newtype element of the franchise, untouched since the 80's, it made it front and center thematically in a way that precisely none of the other shows do (MSG and Zeta come closest). And the stuff it does with Newtype-related tech is brilliant - it's all weirdly logical, consistent with established Gundam tech, and is also conceptually fascinating (something that really deserved more room to breath). -Episode 4. Does it have weak elements? Yes. Riddhe goes through the first of his Characterization Whiplash (though he suffers the most from that in the 5th episode). The stupid inclusion of an "anger spirit" of Loni's dad that never really factors in seriously confuses the characterization and the intent of that whole final confrontation. But the episode is a personal favorite for a few reasons. It has two of the best standalone scenes in the series (the desert and the cafe). It has a fantastic sendoff for the Zeon remnants, without glorifying them or their cause. But most importantly, it takes a deeply problematic and out-of-place part of the novel and replaces it with something that's much closer to what the show is trying to do/say. Anybody who thinks we would have been better off with Mahdi Garvey's Jihad is seriously deluding themselves. -Production values are generally through the roof. The show is gorgeous (though digital animation being what it is, it definitely lacks a "used future" aesthetic that would have suited the setting and story really well). The fights are cool and, with a couple stray exceptions, mostly really well-done too; even when they're one-sided, it's generally justified by circumstance. The dub is probably the best effort the franchise has ever received. But that soundtrack! My god, the soundtrack. It's easily the best part of the OVA. Hiroyuki Sawano out-did himself. Phenomenal stuff. Stuff I don't like: -The 7th episode. God, that seventh [expletive] episode. I don't find it unwatchably awful, but it fumbles with stuff that the show previously did very well with and does a disservice to practically every single character. It's the only episode that gets WORSE the more I think about it, and thanks to its nature, retroactively makes the show as a whole worse as well. -Special shout-out to the Neo Zeong. There is nothing in the entire series more out-of-place or a more obvious attempt to leverage its popularity into a model kit sale. Vomit. -The decision to excise the corporate politics of the novel means that Martha is a shallow joke of a villain and Alberto is completely useless. If any characters were utterly trashed by the adaptation, it's those two, although Banagher's friends don't fare much better. -Riddhe is a character I both love and hate and I really wish he had been handled more consistently. That's a much shorter list than my Likes, but they're arguably things with a pretty big impact.
My OVA Head-canon is that Full Frontal is a memory clone of Char created for propaganda purposes using a recovered Sazabi psyco-frame. This is actually mostly what he is in the novel, only it doesn't use the Sazabi; the reason I modify that bit is that it at least kind of explains the Magical Mystery Tour that he takes Banagher on. See, it's established in the original series that Newtype consciousness transcends time and space on death (i.e. Lalah's "I CAN SEE TIME!"). If we reason that Char died in CCA and that experience got imprinted onto the Sazabi's psycoframe, then it also stands to reason that the experience was transferred to Full Frontal. Now, Unicorn goes to pretty great lengths to show that memories are something that you can share via Psycoframe resonance, so while that Magical Mystery Tour makes no sense on its own, if it's something that Full Frontal *has* seen, then it suddenly makes perfect sense. He can show it to Banagher because that's what Psycoframes let him do. It also nicely explains his motivations and personality a bit. Having seen the End of Time and how ultimately meaningless any of the petty, squabbling conflicts of man are, he gains his characteristic nihilism. It doesn't matter to him that his co-prosperity sphere plot is only an immediate solution and perpetuates a cycle of war and vengeance, because breaking the cycle doesn't change our ultimate fate. |
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